Daniel Souterius, On the Duty of Merchants, eds., Joost Hengstmengel & Henri Krop; trans., Albert Gootjes (CLP Academic, 2025)
“The world is not run from where you think it is. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from Lisbon, from Lyon. From wherever the merchant ships set sail off into the west. Not from castle walls, from counting houses. From the pens that scrape out your promissory notes.”
Thomas Cromwell to Harry Percy, Wolf Hall (2015), Season 1, Episode 3.
The Dutch East India Company was formed in 1602, following the first expedition from Amsterdam in 1595 to Southeast Asia, which had returned with hundreds of thousands of pounds of spices. The new company would get a monopoly on that trade; its existence would facilitate the creation of the Amsterdam stock exchange. Power to wage war, capture, imprison, and execute criminals, mint money, negotiate treaties, and form new colonies was granted to the company. Invested with massive state capital, the company boasted its own armies, fortifications, and, of course, navy. In many ways, the Dutch East India Company was not just a corporation but a sovereign, one with international reach, and it dominated European trade in Asia for nearly 200 years.
The rise of a new merchant class, and new merchant power, in the early modern period was a revolution of its own. Whereas even in the mid-sixteenth century, international trade was predominantly oriented around cloth (and mostly wool), the seventeenth-century eastern (and western) expansion brought in not only new textiles but new luxury items and novelties. Sugar, coffee, tobacco, silk, cotton, porcelain, and the like. New technologies allowed stronger, bigger, and faster vessels to move the goods. The new type of corporations structured for these new ventures (including the settlement of the new world) were governments to themselves, as any of the early American charters indicate. They conquered, settled, and profited, and at least in the case of the Dutch, enriched their parent companies greatly. In a very real sense, by the seventeenth century, merchants were not just a new professional class but a new ruling class. They had power and wealth that most feudal lords could have only dreamed of, even if their relative prestige lagged.
In much of Christendom, trade was still considered a necessary evil, not an aspirational profession. As Joost Hengstmengel and Henri Krop note in their introduction to On the Duties of Merchants, a 1615 text from Daniel Souterius, “The realm of commerce, and that of retail trade in particular, was associated with vice and deemed unworthy of a self-respecting ‘free’ man.” In the early seventeenth century, “the moral status of the merchant was not a settled question yet.” What is, perhaps, most interesting about Soterius’s text, then, is that it was written at all.
What Souterius seems to have recognized early, when the East India Company was little more than a decade old, was that merchants had opportunities to rule like princes. They, therefore, should be instructed like princes. As a genre, the mirror for princes literature was ancient; from Xenophon to Erasmus, the practice of teaching princes how to embody princely character, cultivate virtue, and rule effectively was regular in nearly every epoch of western history, but especially that of Christendom. Souterius endeavored to provide the same for the new emergent princes. If they were to rule, they should do so virtuously, patriotically, and effectively. In a word, they should live up to the newly dignified role that they occupied in commercial societies like Holland and Zeeland. Souterius’s treatise is both an apology for mercantile pursuits and an instruction manual for those doing the pursuing.
Accordingly, instead of a magistrate, Souterius’s work is dedicated to “the directors of the India Company among the Dutch.” This feature also signals the shifting dynamics of Europe. Even non-political works were usually dedicated to a magistrate, king, or noble patron. On the Duties of Merchants is addressed to commercial men. Souterius presented an elevated view of commerce. “Nothing is more useful, pleasant, and honest for a republic.” There would, in fact, be no republic without it. And, in fact, he thought the company was already governing parts of India quite well.
Born in England to Flemish parents, Souterius’s family settled back in the Netherlands, where Daniel received the new learning of humanism at Leiden. Armed with the ancients and Protestantism, Souterius took up an ecclesiastical career in Kampen, then Haarlem, entering heated conflicts over the teachings of Jacob Arminius in both cities. Souterius was prolific, as even his contemporaries acknowledged. His Duties of Merchants reflects his enthusiasm for reformation not only of doctrine and liturgy, but society. An evidently Christian work, Souterius nevertheless overwhelmingly relies on sources from antiquity. Classical aphorisms and allusions are strung together in a “single tapestry,” Souterius tells us—a patchwork of pagan and Christian authors. Not ambitious to reinvent the wheel, Souterius says he is only giving his sources life and spirit, uniting them for common cause. The new translation helpfully footnotes all of them for those of us not reared in the new learning as intensely as Souterius was. One benefit to the reader these new editions from the Acton Institute provide is the realization that we are lesser mortals, or at least embarrassingly less learned than the early modern authors.
Trade and commerce are noble pursuits because they compound the yield of the “fatherland.” Even those skeptical of merchants cannot help but admire and enjoy the results. However blessed a nation may be in its natural resources and industry, no soil contains everything its people may need or desire. Nations that succeed in trade will, therefore, grow prosperous and happy. Trade being defended, Souterius instructs his readers in piety. Merchants who are predatory or fraudulent, who prefer private wealth to public gain, are not worthy of the title mercator. Whether merchants are properly considered public men in the new era of the East India Company, or still merely private men, made no difference. A public spiritedness is required of every man in a republic, but especially of those invested with public trust, like the merchants headed to Bengal to confront the Mughals. Souterius opens his work quoting Cicero: “men are born for the sake of men, that they may be able mutually to help one another.” Souterius wants merchants to go forth and conquer, to profit, but to ever do so in service to God and country.
Men of commerce, like princes—like any man—are to keep a good conscience by practicing honesty, charity, humility, and fairness, being zealous for justice, serving the public good, and above all striving for heavenly glory. Remember, fortune is fickle, life is inconstant and fragile, and death levels all men. Merchants especially must be wary of pride and greed, from which all vice springs. “You should not conduct yourself like those who resemble pigs and care for nothing but their fodder.” For “when you have been freed from the lure of the world and the bonds of your vices, you will win from God ‘the crown of faith and the price of immortality.’”
This advice was not new; applying it to merchants in exalted terms was new. The duties of piety listed provide the headings for each chapter of Duties of Merchants, and you do not have to be a merchant (nor live in the seventeenth century) to be edified by them. Do not seek false, cheap reputation, but true renown for charity and justice. Fame based on wealth unfairly gained is worthless, a dishonor to heaven and fatherland; but notoriety gained for well-deserved accomplishment is to be lauded. God sees even if people are fooled. “O merchant, you would no doubt do well to set and keep before your eyes a Guardian of whom you are mindful, believing that he sees your entire being. Would it not be to your honor if you acted as if you lived in the sight of a good and always present Prince?”
The morals presented here are perennial, but the window into early Protestant economic thought is something that, for many, will have to be readopted. The lessons given by Souterius will not frustrate many Christians today, of whatever stripe, but his posture toward the commercial and mercantile might, especially since Roman Catholics have dominated this space in recent memory. Yet again, we are reminded that Protestants have a moral tradition of their own, and one that needs to be heard. Business is good, but it is not just for monetary profit, but for national benefit. Souterius would no doubt vigorously interrogate any industry today that conflicts in practice or result with national interests, or that favors foreign nations in production and trade, or that produces mere trivialities, or that preys on citizens. Moreover, any trade or product that is morally corrupt, unjust, or even useless would be unworthy of pursuit.
Souterius’s reaction to predatory lending, mass offshoring, de-industrialization, and the like, and the merchants and bankers behind it all, would be fairly predictable, but so too would his reaction to those who at least pretend to long for a pre-modern localist, de-commercialized, agrarian economy. Souterius wrote for the modern man, the nationalist man, the Protestant man. Virtue is not altered by change in class, economic, or material conditions. It is applied anew, and no profession, old or new, sits outside its jurisdiction. So too, then, can all professions proceed honorably and be worthy of honor. Commerce should be ordered to the good, but also the supreme good. Patriotism and piety, that’s the message for merchants from Souterius.
Image: The stock exchange of Hendrick de Keyser, Job Adriaenszoon Berckheyde. Wikimedia Commons.
